Not Thinking Clearly

Though there is plenty of competition, these are some of the most arrogant words ever uttered by an American president. ~Michael Gerson

Gerson should know a thing or two about arrogant words uttered by Presidents, since he was responsible for writing some of the most insanely presumptuous and hubristic presidential statements of the last fifty years. So it’s a bit rich to hear Gerson tell us about the political dangers of presidential arrogance. That’s not what interests me about Gerson’s article and the avalanche of commentary that has followed the report of Obama’s statement. What I find remarkable is how thoroughly Obama’s critics misunderstand him.

Obama is expressing the bewilderment of someone who has made the mistake of thinking that voters normally behave rationally and then stop behaving rationally when they are under pressure. Obama may be an “intellectual snob” in some respects, but his statement about scared voters doesn’t tell us this. The problem isn’t that Obama attributes irrationality to voters now. His mistake came from attributing rationality to voters in the past. This is an easy mistake to make: “the people” are wise and intelligent when they agree with me, and have become inexplicably dense when they do not.

What is odd is that Obama seems to think that voters were not scared and were “thinking clearly” in the wake of the financial crisis (when arguably very few people were thinking clearly), but have become unduly fearful in the years since then, and he compounds the error by assuming that the public has well-defined policy preferences that can only be obscured or blocked by fear. Obama actually makes the same mistake that conservative pundits have been making all year, which is the mistake of identifying voter behavior in terms of ideological content and support for or opposition to a policy agenda. The difference is that Obama believes that 2008 represented a vote for his agenda, while the conservative pundits assume that 2010 is a vote against his agenda, when the truth is that his agenda has been more or less irrelevant to the dynamics of both elections.

Voting ideologically or voting on policy is not the way most voters vote, which is maddening to political observers, activists and politicians who are trying to make some sense out of the indecipherable mish-mash of contradictory preferences the majority presents to them. If one makes the reasonable, mistaken assumption that 2008 was a positive endorsement of the agenda Obama campaigned on, the current political situation doesn’t make much sense. After all, Obama largely did more or less what he said he would do, and in thanks for largely keeping his campaign promises his party is about to be badly punished. To the extent that he has disappointed anyone, as every politican inevitably will, it is progressives who have every right to complain that they have been shortchanged.

Gerson’s reaction and feigned outrage are typical of conservative pundits who have concluded on the basis of no evidence that the public’s expression of economic anxiety and discontent have some discernible ideological meaning, and further that this meaning is undeniably in line with a debt-slashing austerity agenda. Obama and the conservative pundits are all trying to give voters credit for careful deliberation and sober decision-making at some point, which is what politicians and activists have to do if they want to avoid offending large numbers of voters. Obama’s critics naturally want to say that Obama is insulting the intelligence of the voters, but all that he is saying is that he thinks voters really are intelligent and must be confused if they want to vote in what Obama must think is a foolish, destructive way. This is more or less what Obama’s opponents believed about Obama voters in the fall of 2008. Far from being some revelation of Obama’s character, his statement doesn’t amount to much more than a claim that he believes voters are misguided if they vote for Republicans, which is presumably what most Democrats believe. It is also what most Republicans believe about Democratic voters.

As usual, the truth about Obama is that he is not as exceptional or strange or different or unprecedented as everyone wants him to be in one way or another. He is a conventional center-left Democrat who thinks supporting Republican politicians at the polls is a mistake, and just like every Republican who tears up about our supposedly “center-right country” Obama assumes that the majority would normally be on his side were it not for extraordinary circumstances.

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6 Responses to Not Thinking Clearly

After all, Obama largely did more or less what he said he would do, and in thanks for largely keeping his campaign promises his party is about to be badly punished.

I don’t think that’s what he’s being punished for. He’s being punished for not fixing the economy. To quote David Frum (speaking about Democrats and especially Republicans): voters don’t vote for a program, they vote for results. If the economy were in good shape now, the voters could forgive Obama for everything, even health care reform.

I don’t have any polling evidence or anything to support this. It just seems to me that the economy is the background on which everyone decides to love or hate Obama for foreground issues like health care, the stimulus, etc.

Far from being some revelation of Obama’s character, his statement doesn’t amount to much more than a claim that he believes voters are misguided if they vote for Republicans, which is presumably what most Democrats believe. It is also what most Republicans believe about Democratic voters.

Welcome to Crazytown. It isn’t the first time that Obama (and to a lesser extent other Democrats) have been lambasted for the unheard-of audacity of believing that people should vote for them.

This is another in the continuing series of treating politics as sports. What happens now is the best/worst thing ever. There’s money in pontification, regardless of whether the pontification has any connection to reality, let alone whether it’s accurate or not. There has to be a “narrative” presented with some deeper meaning regardless of whether it has anything to do with anything.

If you say that we live in a two-party system, and one of those parties has done significantly better in the last two elections than the other has, then one would expect, given the nature of the two-party system, that they would do worse in the next election. But there’s no “narrative” there. So who would pay to have someone write about or put it on TV? It’s the same reason sportscasters and writers talk about “grit,” “momentum,” or “mental toughness.”

I tend to agree, Aaron. I think that it would have been a completely different landscape had he attacked the economic downturn first, with proper job stimulus and meaningful financial reform.

The public does not fully appreciate the fact that the bankers put a gun to our heads and that what Congress and the President did to alleviate that particular situation averted a greater disaster. The bankers certainly won’t own up to it, they will continue to bleat on about him being “anti-business.”

I hear the ads for Steny Hoyer here in the metro DC area, and he is articulating it as it needs to be said: he voted to give states the funding to keep teachers, policemen and firefighters working. Whether or not you actually agree, this is the message that Dems who voted for the stimulus should be repeating. Instead, some are running from their records like chickens with their heads cut off, feeding the narrative of fiscal irresponsibility.

What evidence do you have that Obama “attributed rationality to voters in the past”? Because he gave rousing speeches and accepted the Presidency when given to him? Surely you did not expect him to say publicly “thanks for voting for me but I know you did so out of irrational fear”?

There is a danger when analyzing Obama’s actions of giving him too much benefit of the doubt, but in this case I think we can assume that the most gifted American politician since Reagan understands at least a little about the electorate.